Sparks - Fix my kid cases

I remember that a family therapist, Betty Carter, a couple of decades ago, described some of her cases as "fix my kid" cases. I see this regularly where parents are the ones struggling and having problems and they present their kid as the object of treatment.

Being a family therapist, I usually accept the presenting complaint, but alert to opportunities to engage the parent and reframe the issues so that the parent gets the help that he or she or both need so they can remove the burden of family symptom bearer from the child.

Now days with evidence based practices which are reductionistic and linear, there is a lack of awareness of the systemic quality of human behavior. This leads unfortunately, to misdiagnoses and treatment approaches which are ineffective and often times not only miss the point but have iatrogenic effects on the identified patient.

I see kids now days who have been given heavy duty neuroleptic drugs to "treat" symptomatic behaviors which the parents complain of. Clincians with tunnel vision attempt to medicate away the parent's complaint by medicating the kid. It would probably be more helpful in the long run to medicate the parent to lower the parent's anxiety and projection of anxiety and problems onto the child.

There are other counseling approaches and behavioral approaches to address the problems but these take time and skills, something that clinicians have in increasingly short supply in the HMO driven culture of the corporate bottom line.